Detective Brian Cambell ran across a flier from the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office that showed a photo of a Purple Heart that was in the evidence room.

Cambell said there were no reports of a missing Purple Heart in the city of Delray Beach. But he said he wanted to try and help find its owner.

"I know things can sit in evidence for years and years, and I didn't think that's where that should be," Cambell said.

Cambell said he remembers seeing a news story about a member of the National Guard who helps reunite medals with owners.

He contacted Vermont Army National Guard Capt. Zachariah Fike, the founder of Purple Hearts Reunited Inc.

Fike was able to get Cambell in touch with a niece, the only living relative of the soldier who owned the medal, and she confirmed the medal belonged to the uncle she never met, Frank De Paoli, of New York.

"The basic story was he was assigned to to the Army Air Corp in the Philippines in the 1940s," Cambell said. "He was a prisoner of war and during his transport from the Philippines to Japan, a U.S submarine spotted the ship and sank the ship and he actually died on the ship."

Cambell said De Paoli was aboard the Arisan Maru on Oct. 24, 1944. De Paoli and others were being transported to Japan to work as forced labor when the ship was hit by a torpedo from the American submarine.

Cambell said back then there were no flags or markings on the ships to indicate it was carrying POWs. There were only nine survivors; five escaped and made their way to China in one of the ship's lifeboats, and four others were captured by Imperial Japanese naval vessels.

"To see that this was one of those people on that ship, it was just another reason I felt it needed to be in the proper place," Cambell said.

The De Paoli family would like to have the medal placed in the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor in New York.